Hi there, Either you have great guts or else in desperate need of some shaking to wake you up from your state of mindless and unacceptable criticism of players, most of whome are ranked among all time best of world's cricketing legends. You want to teach a man with more than 70 centuries behind his name, what the reflexes should mean?? Or to a spinner who is among all time great leggies, how to grip the bowl?? Instead of counting the number of fingers he uses to grip the bowl, just count the wickets he has taken and what are the likes of kaneria, of even closing on those milestones. Just an advice, be a bit more mature in writing and use proper facts rather than manupulating them for spicing up your article.
Besides the cricketing abilities in different departments of cricket, there also seems to be question of physical fitness of players. Surely most of our players dont seem to be at their physical fitness levels that will allow them to show their batting/bowling/fielding skills. For example Zaheer does not have the form to attempt driven to him by the batsman in his bowling. Similarly Agarkar misses most of the balls hit towards the boundary that pass him while he is bowling. (Contrast this with Kumble who puts tremendous effort to collect the ball sent towards him by the batsman while he is bowling). A comparision of each of our players to similar player in the Pak team reveals that our boys lack in fitness, determination and also team spirit. Tendulkar falling down to his feet before the wicket after being bowled out, Lakshman missing easy to field balls, Zaheer missing easy catches which arrive in front of him, and Dhoni missing stumping chances are some examples of situations where our player's physical fitness is involved.
Firstly, The team needs coaches for Bowling. Waqar in his commentry said Irfan's ball holding technique is faulty and that will lead to a qucik failure in Pathan's abilities. He also pointed out that he tried to help Pathan but Pathan appears to have said he has been bowling this way ( Attitude problem? ) Remember Younis making a comment abt Dravid providing tips for him and attributing his success to learning from Dravid - Good Learners are Good masters. Secondly the Kukuberra Ball, Indian spinners need help from the Greats like Prasanna Thirdly, the comparison of the length and the distance from off stump at which the ball is pitched by Indian and Pak bowlers reveal that the Indian bowlers bowl much shorter and also give good elbow room for the batsmen to freeze arms. This needs to be tackled urgently. As for Tendulkar, the way he batted in the initial stages of First ODI leaves definitely an impresion that he is down hill. But let us pray , his Ton helps him regain his confidence and brings back cheers toall of us. Raaj bala
Pathan might be well aware of his problem and the media focus on it.Do you expect him to change this admittedly bad habit in a day or in an inning of a test match?I think a bowler needs to go to nets and wotk on his problem in offseason and not in the middle of a match or a season.
In India the ball used is SG Test not Dukes.True that India needs backup spinners, but tell me an instance(barring Warne) where a good spinner is produced from countires other than Sub-Continent in recent times!how do you expect spinners to take wickets on those unconducive tracks
Hey man don't pretend to understand cricket better than your audience and for that matter don't try too hard/desperately to convince us about your cricketing fundas but those "griping" details. Well if you want to rake up a debate, this effort is appreciable but just for the sake of cirticising and making somebody scapegoats it is idiotic to refer the likes of kumble, saurav, sachin or viru or bhajji.. How can you be so sure that they are not doing anything? And what about changing the whole set up from batters to coach.... I honestly believe that your column should be replaced by somebuddy responsible!!! Man if you are maried then get us a junior Prem soon and send him to any better test /oneday playing country and rid us of sourav's, kumble et all. After all nuts like you would be never satiated with desi stuff (exception being the reference of bishen bedi, another joker)... Till then have a nice time and dont waste our time writing human exctera.... Stop bothering or derogating our heroes, in fact we are really running short of them dont even try to tailor the remaining..
Yes I agree totally with Aravind. With BCCI world's richest establishment must spend the money for the cricket in India and for the betterment of Indian cricket. MRF pace academy is done by private establishments. Why not BCCI take the initiative to start a Spin academy so that we do not lose the art of spinning. Yes Kumble and Harbhajan are going to struggle when the pitch is not helping them. Indian team will never learn from the mistakes. Laxman and Tendulkar are well past the prime. Unless Shewag realizes that being an opener grafting runs should be the primary focus in moving and raising pitches he will not be consistent. He will get an odd century here and there. Talking of fast bowlers, I think once fame has hit them, they stop trying and take their position for granted. Training hard, maintainig discipline in line and length, mixing up deliveries, with fuller length, yorkers, leg cutter, off cutters should be the key to success, rather being pedestrian and predictable. Yes India needs to go back to drawing board and infuse professionalism, dedication and should start grooming players and do not lose sight of future. A very thoughful and a nice article.
One match does not take a team back to square one.Lets look at the upsides for the indian team in pakistan.
1. Record opening partnership between sehwag and dravid
2. Great batting by DHoni and pathan in the second test.
3. Irfans Hat tricck in the third test match and yuvraj and sauravs resolve in the middle.
We had one bad session of batting. For India to win we need bowlers who can scare the heck out of the opposition. Having said that these pitches are docile and didnt help even the pakistan bowlers.But for that bad session , we played pretty decent battingwise and all were in pretty good in nick. sachin didnt get many chances in the first 2 tests.We are becomng too result oriented.how we win matters rather than if we win or not. how we play matters a lot.An aggressive leave is as good as a sweetly timed drive but a four hit out of anxiety or pressure is equally bad as getting out.rahul and greg I beleive are trying to get to where the focus is on on process and how u do things. If we do things with focus and attention and even joy, then that is fulfilling in itself.If this is applied on the field, then Indian cricket is an inner winner
Yes Kumble and Harbhajan should be rested why because Arvind thinks so. Advice from Bishen Singh Bedi and Erappalli prasanna is fine but I do not think they would have loved to bowl to in these conditions. And we will never know if they would have fared better. Rules as well as the game of cricket have changed big time since both these greats have played cricket. I am sure Harbhajan must be trying his best to impart as much spin he can on the kookubura ball why would he not want to repeat his success with every match he plays. For kumble though i would say why would he want to impart any kind of spin on the ball when he has managed to take so many wickets without actually turning the ball. I am happy that he does not get impacted by reading all this foolish stuff. Kumble for me is far better bowler than Bishen bedi or any of our so called spinning greats.
Two more victories on a row... and this same author can talk paragraphs about Kumble's genius about turning the ball around with his 3 fingers only and attributing all the success to only those three golden fingers! (not to mention, the coach will be congratulated too for encouraging Harbhajan to concentrate on gripping the seams )
